The Fibre Index shows a massive surge in broadband data usage since 2012.

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BT Openreach, the owner and oberherr of the UK's "superfast" ""fibre"" network, has finally released some information about the utilisation of its network for the past three years.

Called the Fibre Index, this appears to be part of Openreach's effort to appease Ofcom, which had previously called for the twisted-pair behemoth to provide more transparency. Rather impressively, a link to Fibre Index can be found right at the top of the Openreach homepage, rather than buried deep within the site. Openreach says that the Fibre Index will be updated "seasonally," which hopefully means "every three months" rather than "whenever we get around to it."

The stats provided by the Fibre Index are rather impressive. The main graph, which you can see at the top of this story, shows the average data usage per FTTC connection since winter 2012. Today, the average FTTC subscriber downloads 165GB and uploads 25GB of data per month; back in 2012, just two and a half years ago, the combined total was less than 60GB. This equates to roughly 40 percent year-over-year growth, which is pretty massive.

In a separate press release accompanying the launch of the Fibre Index, BT Openreach said that average download speeds in the UK have quadrupled from 5.2Mbps in 2010 to 22.8Mbps today. Back in 2010, FTTC was available to just 4 million premises; today, that number is 24 million.

Unsurprisingly, Openreach says that 9pm on Sunday is the busiest time for FTTC connections: that's when everyone's watching Netflix, or catching up on the weekend's football matches in 4K. 165GB downloaded per month is roughly equivalent to about 30 streamed films in HD, or maybe a dozen hours of HD TV per week. Traffic dips during the summer, apparently, when everyone is outside in the sun—though that doesn't explain the huge spike in summer 2013. (After doing a little research, it seems the spike might be connected to the top-end Unlimited package actually being unlimited and non-traffic-shaped.)

The last titbit is that about 75 percent of the data that traverses Openreach's FTTC network is caused by 25 percent of customers. This isn't unusual: basically, for every three people who just surf the Internet and watches the occasional YouTube video, there's one person who downloads a lot of films and broadcasts their gaming on Twitch.

Further Reading

If you were hoping for the Fibre Index to contain a little more in-depth data, such as how long it takes Openreach to install a new connection or fix a fault, you're sadly out of luck. It would also be interesting to see a more granular breakdown of traffic usage, or any other interesting insights that can be divined from petabytes of data across some 20 million users of Openreach's network.

Ofcom, the UK's telecommunications regulator, is currently assessing whether it should split up BT Retail (which sells services to customers) and BT Openreach (which manages the network that the services run on). Openreach is forced to provide an equal level of service to BT Retail, Sky, TalkTalk, or any other service provider that wants to use Openreach's infrastructure—but, according to various reports, that level of service isn't very good. Sky is one of the more vocal proponents of spinning off Openreach into a separate company.

Ofcom will likely make a ruling on the Retail/Openreach split in the next few months. The result of the proposed BT-EE merger could play a role in the final decision.

Updated: BT e-mailed Ars to tell us that it does actually publish information about how quickly/slowly it installs new connections and fixes faults. It's even in the same easy-to-read infographic format, too.

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Sebastian Anthony
Sebastian is the editor of Ars Technica UK. He usually writes about low-level hardware, software, and transport, but it is emerging science and the future of technology that really get him excited. Emailsebastian@arstechnica.co.uk//Twitter@mrseb